On Tuesday evening, congressional lawmakers were forced to respond to the second immediately controversial story involving the president to surface in roughly 24 hours. The New York Timesreported that President Trump asked former FBI Director James Comey to halt a federal investigation into ousted National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn, citing a memo written by Comey as its source.

Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, fired off a letter to acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, demanding that the bureau produce all “memoranda, notes, summaries, and recordings” of James Comey’s meetings with Trump no later than May 24. The reports in the press, he wrote, “raise questions as to whether the President attempted to influence or impede the FBI’s investigation as it relates to Lt. Gen. Flynn.”

He delivered a similar message to his Twitter followers:

.@GOPoversight is going to get the Comey memo, if it exists. I need to see it sooner rather than later. I have my subpoena pen ready.

AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, indicated in a statement that the GOP leader supported the committee’s efforts. “We need to have all the facts, and it is appropriate for the House Oversight Committee to request this memo,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Not all Republican lawmakers appeared quite so eager to employ congressional oversight tools to seek the memo, however.

In response to a question about whether he would try to obtain it, Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is currently investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, reportedly told journalists that “the burden is on TheNew York Times, if they’re reporting it, and they’ve got somebody who’s got the document.” According to Politico’s Elana Schor, Burr said: “They need to get the document and get it released.”

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Burr’s committee, though, has the power to issue subpoenas, just as other House and Senate panels do. The Senate Intelligence Committee website states that “subpoenas authorized by the committee for the attendance of witnesses or the production of memoranda, documents, records, or any other material may be issued by the chairman, the vice chairman, or any member of the committee designated by the chairman.”

In response to an e-mailed question about whether Burr’s committee would attempt to subpoena the Comey memo, a representative for Burr replied: “The committee will continue to follow the facts where they lead.”

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters on Tuesday that he has asked Comey to testify “before the Judiciary Committee to tell his side of the story,” according to a Politico report that published just after the Times story broke. Comey had previously declined to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A number of House Republicans echoedcallsfor Comey to appear in front of Congress, and reportedly so did Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation into Russian interference in the election.

The FBI is also conducting an examination of Russia’s involvement, information that Comey made public during a March congressional hearing.

“Asking FBI to drop an investigation is obstruction of justice. Obstruction of justice is an impeachable offense.”

The White House denied the Times report, telling the paper in a statement that “the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn. … The president has the utmost respect for our law-enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.”

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement that if the reports are true, at best “Trump has committed a grave abuse of power,” or “at worst, he has obstructed justice.” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor, warned that “the country is being tested in unprecedented ways.”

Some Democrats raised the specter of impeachment in reaction to the news. On Twitter, Democratic Representative Ted Deutch of Florida wrote: “Asking FBI to drop an investigation is obstruction of justice. Obstruction of justice is an impeachable offense.” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Independent Senator Angus King if “we are getting closer and closer to the possibility of yet another impeachment process.” To which the Maine senator replied: “Reluctantly … I have to say yes, simply because obstruction of justice is such a serious offense.”

The report arrives one week after Trump fired Comey as FBI director. At the time, the president cited a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which criticized Comey’s handling of his agency’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server.

Later, however, Trump indicated that he had planned to fire Comey “regardless of recommendation.” Trump added that “when I decided to do it, I said to myself—I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”

On Tuesday, some Republican lawmakers reacted with a general sense of dismay in the wake of the recent news reports on the president. “If recent allegations are true, they mark the beginning of a new and very sad chapter of scandal and controversy in our country,” GOP Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida wrote on Twitter.

On Monday, lawmakers were asked to respond to a Washington Post report alleging that the president had shared highly sensitive classified information with Russian officials in the White House related to terrorism. Administration officials have pushed back against the report. The next day, however, Trump posted two tweets that appeared to confirm the disclosure, saying that he had an “absolute right” to “share with Russia” information related to terrorism.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”